Week 2 (Crisis)

This week we need to talk to about a crisis that happened to us and how we dealt with it. My incident goes back to two summers ago in august where work organised a sailing trip to Gozo with the advanced group of sailors, I was the head coach of this trip and a lot of pre planning and safety was needed, on the day going up to gozo was all plain sailing and the kids had a blast, we set up the camps and set a fire going to start cooking dinner. The night passed fine and the next morning we set off to go back to malta as the kids had a race to attend two days later, on the way down it was a typical summers day, the kids where on there way and by the time we got to cirkewwa the group started to separate. but the coaches separated as we had two ribs and the situation was under control until when we arrived to the fish farms out of St Pauls Bay and infront of us I saw this massive black cloud coming towards us which meant two things its either a hell load of rain or a big squal(storm).I radiod the other coaches and we took the decision to take the kids in to shelter in the nearest bay, but it was to late as the rain hit and 200m away from one of the boats a twister appears, the storm had hit us and it hit us badly and the number 1 rule when stuck in a storm is iff you can sail sail in to safety and iff you can't sail stay on the boat. whilst the storm we had two accidents which consisted in a boat loosing a mast and being picked up by a fishing trawler and later dropped off at the bay, and another student getting knocked out concussed and dropped was off and went straight to hospital with anther coach, after the storm we re grouped and checked that everything was ok and set back to sailing down to the club. we dealt with the situation by staying calm as we had experienced storms like these many times and told the kids not to get scared and sail to safety, other precautions we could have taken was prepare the sails just incase a storm hit but the way it all happened was totally unexpected. Also a 3 day forecast from more than one weather site would have been helpful. All in all i think I would take bit more precaution next time a trip is planned.